They drove out to the beach every Friday and stayed until very late Sunday night. They almost couldn’t bear to go back to Brooklyn. “This is where we really belong,” Ray said, and he was right. Later, when Southampton College opened, they both got faculty positions, and Helen made the move from the city to the beach with ease.
But it was those early days, when the house was theirs only during the weekend, that Helen remembered most clearly. One Saturday in 1954, as Ray was about to leave the house and spend the day exploring the area, Helen stopped him in the hallway. “Wait,” she said shyly. “Would you like to go back to bed for a little while?”
Ray stopped and put down the bag lunch she had packed him: a sandwich without the crusts, cut into neat triangles, a nectarine carefully checked for scars and soft spots, and a thermos of coffee, black as pitch. They did not go into the bedroom but made love right on the warped wooden floor of the hallway. The salt air had made the whole house buckle.
Ray smiled over and then under her, smiled as she moved her hips to his. Just as in formal dancing, here she would never take the lead. She would never initiate a rhythm; she always left it up to him. This control seemed to frighten Ray, but somehow this fear must have been arousing. He placed his hands on her bottom, and pulled her up to him frantically. It was an action that might be taken by a person waking up to a house full of fire—a survival action, pulling a lover or child smack against his body as they wove their way through a thicket of flames.
Helen had wanted very much to conceive. They had been trying for months, and after they made love that morning, she lay flat on her back on the floor, her hands on her stomach. “Oh,” she said suddenly.
“What is it?” Ray asked in a worried voice.
“I just felt something,” she told him. “Inside me, moving around. Like the beginnings of a baby, I think.”
He laughed at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“No,” she insisted, “I think this time it really worked. I actually
feel
pregnant.” An image flitted through her mind: a microscopic fetus, its proportions minnowlike, almost all head and eyes, sucking its thumb somewhere deep inside of her. Ray laid his head down on his wife’s stomach, listening closely for signs of life.
—
A
re you ever happy?” Helen had asked her daugher once, when Lucy was eighteen.
“What do
you
think?” Lucy answered. Helen never brought the subject up again.
Lucy’s poetry matured early—long, graceful poems that were accepted by small literary magazines. She went off to Barnard, but she did not get much out of it, and she dropped out after three semesters. “The education’s too narrow,” she said. Helen did not know what that meant. She only knew that Lucy was a rarity, and that she needed to be left alone. Sometimes, though, she had to be fished up by her parents.
She had first tried to kill herself when she was eighteen, spending the summer living in a hot Barnard dormitory, working as a waitress in a Beef ’n Brew by day and writing poems long into the night. Something had come unstuck, and Helen received a phone call from a doctor at Columbia Presbyterian, telling her that Lucy had slit her wrists and was in the hospital.
Ray was out on a sea expedition that day, and Helen took the train into the city by herself, feeling as if she might faint at any moment. At the hospital Lucy’s room was large—a ward, really, with freshly made beds, hospital corners tucked in meticulously.
Lucy was over by the window, lying flat on her back. Helen came and stood by the foot of the bed, unable to think of anything right to say. She had trouble collecting her thoughts at all. She just shook her head slowly and said, “Lucy.”
Lucy did not say anything but sighed heavily and moved a stray strand of hair from her eyes. Helen looked around the room helplessly. The woman in the next bed was watching the scene with rude interest. She leaned her head on her hands and stared very closely. She was a round-bodied woman with an equally round face. Helen turned away and knew that she was
going to cry. She dug in her purse for a tissue and wept silently into it for a while.
“What’s she crying for?” the woman asked anyone who would listen. “She thinks she’s so special. What’s she crying for?”
“Listen, I have to go,” Helen said to Lucy all of a sudden. “God, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow, with Dad. We can talk then.” She leaned over to kiss Lucy, then she left. She walked out slowly, looking at all of the women in their beds. Lucy was by far the youngest; she was a child, really.
Television sets flickered soundlessly, showing anonymous women winning prizes on game shows, screaming their hearts out and yet not making a noise. The women in the ward looked doped-up and tired, as if they were just now coming to the surface after anesthesia. In this room, where nurses paced the floor like night watchmen in the bleak hours, lay fragmented women. They were women who did not resist the jab of a needle that would send them into a false sleep. At eighteen, Lucy was one of them.
It felt good to leave the hospital. I am a terrible mother, Helen thought. I have walked right out of there, just glided out the door. I didn’t even ask her why or how or any of the vital questions. I didn’t even sit there and just hold her hand.
Helen got on the subway, and with an extra bit of bravado sat down next to a man of questionable character. He was absently fingering his fly, as if it were a banjo and he were plucking out some rambling, distant tune.
She was able to get in touch with Ray later that day. The
Coast Guard radioed him in, said it was an emergency. She met him at the dock, and he fell into her arms, still wearing half a wet suit. “What is it?” he asked. “What is it?” She told him and she hugged him hard, until they both smelled of brine and kelp.
Years later they were plagued by people—writers, lonelies, crazies. Helen had the phone number changed and their listing plucked from the directory when Lucy died, but even so, people got through, as if by sheer will alone. They called late at night mostly, when their need was at its strongest. “Hello?” they usually whispered or shrieked, asking it like a question, not believing they had connected. “Are you the mother of Lucy Ascher?”
They would swallow down their sobs and tell how much they loved Lucy’s work and ask how Helen and Ray went on with their day-to-day existence. What had Lucy actually been like? they asked with urgency. Had Helen and Ray gotten over it yet? Would they ever?
There was a journalist sent on assignment from a slick news magazine who, when the interview ended, hung around, clearly not wanting to leave. This was just after the publication of
Sleepwalking
, and Helen and Ray sat on the couch stiffly while the woman toyed with her pad and pencil and the light meter on her Pentax for too long a time.
“Well,” Helen said, exhaling a soft whoosh of air, trying to finalize things.
The journalist looked up from her camera, eyes suddenly desperate. “I can’t tell you,” she said, “how much this has meant to me. I’ve been begging my department head for this article for weeks.” She touched Helen’s and Ray’s hands, as if
performing a benediction. “Thank you,” she said, “for spawning Lucy Ascher.”
Spawning. Wasn’t that word usually associated with fish—mother guppies spawning hundreds of little translucent babies, only to eat most of them minutes after birth. In a moment of cockeyed philosophy Helen thought, Maybe we all eat our children. When they are born we press them to ourselves with an air of propriety, searching their faces for shared features, thrilled when we think we see a familiar cast to the eyes. Your nose. My mouth. The baby is born with a set of hand-me-downs.
Helen stood up and said to the woman, “I think you’d better go.” Realizing how this must sound, she added, “It’s supposed to rain, and these roads can get pretty bad.”
After the woman left, Ray and Helen stood facing each other in the living room. Ray had been a wrestler in college, and his shoulders and chest, though long unworked, still made him look hulking. He was big all over, and he had trouble pulling sweaters over his head. She had to help him sometimes as he fumbled like a large, unformed animal trying to slip into a more finished skin.
Now his largeness filled the living room and she felt sorry for him, for them both. Not exactly sorry, more embarrassed as they loomed over the furniture in their living room, helpless in their house by the water.
—
I
t would be naïve to have been completely surprised by Lucy’s death, to choke into a reporter’s thrust-out microphone, “My God, we had no idea, no idea at all.” There wasn’t
anything that particularly surprised Helen. She understood none of it, and never had. When Lucy was hospitalized for not speaking at the age of twelve, her doctor had said to Helen and Ray, “You are going to have your hands full with your child.”
Helen had not agreed with this statement. She took all things literally. Maybe, she was to think years later, that was why she had no ear for poetry. We are not going to have our hands full with Lucy, she knew; we are going to have them empty. Lucy never permitted real touching of any kind. If Helen reached out to stroke down the fine dark hair of her daughter, Lucy ducked away like a hand-shy dog. “Mo-om,” she would say, annoyed, “cut it
out
.” Lucy allowed her no closeness, nothing to hold on to. When she was little they took her out on the boat every Sunday, but she had no makings of a good sailor. She steered rigidly, not letting the boat ride with the wind, always fighting a natural current.
They took her to the marine biology laboratory at the college and let her look at plankton under a powerful microscope. She spent an hour peering at different slides, and Helen and Ray sat together at the other end of the long, narrow room, happy that they had gotten through to her. Finally Lucy rose and walked over to them. There was a faint half-moon under her eye from pressing it to the ocular. “Well,” said Helen, “you seemed to be really enjoying yourself. I’m glad.”
“It was boring,” Lucy said. “Can we go home now?”
So their arms were empty with her, a paradox that seemed to contain the stuff of a Zen koan: When can one’s arms be both full and empty? The solution, after years of traveling the
road to higher consciousness, comes easily: when they are embracing Lucy Ascher.
Yes, Helen thought, we spawned her, that is all.
—
T
here were various signs along the way that clearly showed something was out of kilter. One night when Lucy was sixteen, Helen was wakened out of a thick sleep by the strains of the national anthem. In the dead-serious logic applied by dreamers and people in the throes of delirium, Helen figured that she must be a truly patriotic person at heart—the kind of person who dreams the whole of the national anthem, a version complete with woodwinds, percussion, brass, strings, and even the sporadic
ping
of a triangle asserting its delicate presence.
Helen blinked herself fully awake and realized she had not been dreaming. Ray slept next to her on his stomach, the blanket a tent over his head. Helen stepped into her green slippers and padded into the living room, from where the music seemed to come. There she saw Lucy sitting on the couch, the national anthem blaring from the television set. The music stopped abruptly, and an announcer said in a wilting voice, “This is WNEW, Channel Five, ending our programing day.”
“Lucy?” Helen asked.
Lucy gasped, turning. “Oh, you surprised me, Mom,” she said.
“I heard the music and thought it was a dream,” said Helen. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I never can,” Lucy answered. She turned her face to the ceiling and stretched her arms out at her sides.
It was there, in that early-morning confrontation, that Helen took in the completeness of the pain that her daughter held out to her, palms up, like an offering. Helen did not know from where the pain sprang, and she could not even begin to guess its source. She saw it the way a tourist might see an impressive landmark geyser—focusing only on the arrow-beam of water spouting upward, never thinking about its origin, that hot, dark lake that must lie like the Styx underground. It was that simple vision that stayed with Helen long after.
She came and sat down on the couch next to Lucy. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I never can tell whether you’re very unhappy or just overly serious for a sixteen-year-old.”
In the early days of Helen’s relationship with Ray (their courtship, they used to call it, snickering), Helen often thought he was very depressed. When she questioned him, he seemed shocked. “I’m not in the least depressed,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”
Both of their families lived in Brooklyn then, but it was on the beach in Rockaway in 1941 that they first met. Ray was a freshman at City College, and he told her that he had convinced his parents to let the family go to the beach for the vacation rather than to the same small kosher hotel in the Catskills where they had gone for the past ten years. Ray had taken an oceanography course that spring semester and had fallen in love with oceans—with the idea of them, at least.
They met right in front of the water where he was looking in the sand for interesting shells and she was sunning herself with a three-sided aluminum foil reflector. Ray loomed over her and peered down. Her eyes were closed, of course, so he
coughed lightly to attract her attention. She opened her eyes and saw the crinkled reflection of a boy in the foil. He was big and pale—had obviously not been in the sun much.
“God, you’re tan,” he said, and it was true. Although her family had been at the beach for only two days, she and her sister had been sunning themselves on the blacktop roof of their apartment building in Bensonhurst for two weeks, and Helen knew she looked good. She was wearing her white bathing suit with the vertical stripes, a choice that would, the salesgirl had assured her, show off both her tan and her svelte figure.
Ray was pale but muscular—a combination, she quickly assessed, of the pensive student and the good athlete. Some indoor sport, probably. He brought his shell collection over to her chair and knelt in the warm sand alongside her, explaining things and letting her look through his pocket shell-identification handbook.